


and whatever walks there, walks alone

by Ias



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, F/F, Femslash, Ghosts, Horror, Paranoia, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:52:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are coming to understand that love and hatred are not easy for Lucille Sharpe to distinguish.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and whatever walks there, walks alone

The world is blood and bone. White snow cloaks the air, turning familiar shapes into grey shadows that flicker and dance with the storm. Beneath your feet the earth is bleeding; red boils up in every footstep. You hardly see any of it. Your eyes are on the monster.

Her gown and hair tangles with the wind, whipping around her body in tatters of white and black. But it’s Lucille's eyes which hold you now, hanging in the chaos like two immovable points, blank and mad as a starving wolf’s. You know without a doubt that she will eat you alive. She is the fairy tale monster in flesh and blood, with no woodsman to cut you out of her belly. Behind her, a shimmer hangs in the air behind her that doesn’t belong to the snow. Thomas’s strange, dead eyes cut you deeper than the fear, chewing their way to your heart. You know you have one chance to save yourself. Your hands tighten on the shovel.

Lucille will wait no longer. She lurches forward, teeth bared in a snarl and her cleaver held high.

“Look at him!” You cast your words out in front of you like a hand to block the blow. Something in your face stops her short. The same pain and betrayal that claws your chest to ribbons is alive and busy in her, as well. There is no question. She must look. Her head turns like Orpheus about to behold the abyss.

But it’s not Thomas Lucille sees. Her eyes move upwards, past Thomas’s machine and the plains of red-stained snow: up to the house. The storm seems to open up around it, giving it the impression of the structure having stepped forward on its own. It looms over you both, watching, waiting, feeling no sympathy for the two antlike figures struggling at its feet. You feel a shiver move through you, meeting eyes with the windows that stare down like the eyes of a creature too alien to understand. It seems to fall towards you, toppling up through the sky until there is nothing but Allerdale Hall, nothing but Crimson Peak.

It’s the scream that brings you back. Lucille’s eyes are as riveted on the house as yours; her breath comes out in a rolling bank of fog as she howls. It’s a sound wrenched from some deep cold place inside her, red and ragged. It sinks into you and freezes your limbs, makes you slow as Lucille turns back to face you.

“No,” she hisses through her teeth, eyes dark and alive with something that wasn’t there before. “I won’t let them take me. And neither will you.”

You swing the shovel. It hits nothing but open air, spinning over Lucille’s head as the woman crouches down. Next thing you know you’re on your back, breath knocked out as Lucille surges into you and holds you down. Her hand raises up against the sky streaked with snow—where was the cleaver?—and then it comes down on your skull, and that is the last thing you know.

 

 

 

You wake up in bed. Nightmares slough off you like unmelted snow: it could have been any other morning, ghosts fading to nothing in the light of day. But the specters that walk these halls never left a slash of pain across your cheek, nor a headache that tunnels into the front of your skull and presses all rational thought out. Your tongue tastes of clay and blood.

“What… Where…” You can’t be sure the words have come out at all, not when opening your mouth to speak is not unlike the machinations of a puppeteer struggling to bring wood to life. Your eyes scrape the ceiling, darkness crowding in around the edges, and it seems the carvings above your bed are about to snap shut around you like a mouth. You should not be here. You were going to leave—yes, that was it. But something happened: familiar eyes crinkled in familiar worry. Blood on the threshold. A cold, cold smile.

That memory touches something in you, a note of fear hanging tremulous in the air. The gramophone. The tapes. Thomas— _Alan_ —

You move to lift your hand, and it is only then that you discover how thoroughly you are bound. The strips of cloth cut into your wrists, tied to something behind your head—when you try to shift your legs you’re met with a wave of pain that first clenches your teeth and then tears past them in a cry.

“Best for you not to move, I think.”

 You almost don’t recognize her, even when you feel her sit on the bed beside you and she leans in to look at your face. Her hair is down, its long waves tangled and unbrushed. Her clothing is askew, and from one shoulder dried blood spills like a smear of red clay. But it’s her mouth you can’t look away from, twisted as it is with that awful, unreasoning smile. Her eyes, which always burned with some inner fire, are stoked to a conflagration.

The ties around your wrists dig into you as you struggle to yank them free. Lucille watches this with what you take to be satisfaction.

“I assure you, the ties are quite strong. You won’t get free.”

There is a sob rising in your throat, carrying with it the memories of the night before that crawl back into your consciousness like cockroaches. “What are you—Why—” You break off. “Alan. Where is Alan?”

“The American gentleman? I wouldn’t worry about him.” Lucille’s eyes flash. “I put him with the others. In the vats.”

“No.” Your voice is hardly a whisper, too weak to fight the cold acceptance already sinking into you. You saw the wounds. He was too weak to fight. And now, and now, _good God_. Is there nothing you haven’t lost? You turn your head away and press your eyes shut against the first of the tears. There is only one way to know for sure. You speak to the darkness behind your eyes: you already know the answer, but still you must ask. “Thomas—?”

“Shh.” Her voice is as smooth as silk, as smooth as the skin on her palm as she clamps it over your mouth. Your eye snap back open and find her face inches away, her breath brushing over your face like a moth’s wings. “You won’t say that name anymore. No one will, ever again.” Slowly, her meaning seeps in, but before you have time to decide whether this is justice or grief you feel the hand fastening your lips shut shift to cover your nose.

For a moment, the absence of air is almost comical, tinged with surprise at the silliness of it all. How funny that you can’t breathe, when there was so much air all around. And then the terror sets in, sending you twisting and struggling even when your leg screams in protest, but Lucille’s hand is an iron clamp that threatens to break your teeth within your jaw. Your lungs, devoid of air, are eating themselves alive. Color drains from the edges of your vision, then billows up before your eyes like clouds of smoke. Soon the room is full of it. Soon there is nothing else.

And then the pressure is gone, and the air that comes rushing back into your lungs hurts as badly as the scrape of fingernails on your throat. You cough, you choke, your stomach heaves nothing up—through it all, Lucille only watches. It seems like forever before you can even think of breathing normally. Lucille waits as one who has nothing to wait for, for whom life has become nothing more than the occupation of watching time pass. At last, you think yourself capable of speech.

“Why don’t you just kill me?” The question is braver than you feel. Perhaps it’s because of the faint hope that winds in and out of your ribs—perhaps the woman before you is capable of mercy. Perhaps some piece of her can be reasoned with.

“Oh, Edith,” Lucille whispers. “Killing you would have brought me all the joy in the world. But then I would be alone. All, all alone, with nowhere else to go.” Every word comes slow and colored with darkness, as if spoken from the depths of a tomb. She strokes her hands over your hair, but her eyes scan the room and leap to every shadow. 

“What are you going to do to me?” Your voice hangs in the silence, suspending on a thread. You can feel how delicate that thread is, and how vast and terrible the abyss beneath it.

Lucille smiles—or more accurately, the smile which has remained hardened on her face from the moment she allowed you to look upon her curls into itself a little further. Her fingers wander to your cheek, thumb brushing the soft skin there. “You’re going to stay with me, Edith. And that way, I’ll never be alone.”

You flinch as she traces the wound—you can’t help it. Nor can you stop the screams when her fingernails find that line of red and dig in.

 

 

 

When next you wake, your wounds have been dressed. Your cheek is stiff with plaster over the swollen mess it’s become. The memory of that pain, those twisting, burrowing fingers, makes you squeeze your eyes shut to stop up the tears. The bindings on your wrists are just as tight.

The door opens sometime later.

Lucille’s appearance has changed since your last memories of her—her hair is back in its waves against her skull, her dress as green as butterfly wings. Her smile is like a stain that immediately draws the eye. It’s the only sign of mourning she wears, a hole in her face where human expression should be. Her eyes study you with insect pleasure. She’s holding a tray of tea.

“Did you sleep well?” she asks sweetly. “I hope you’re rested.”

You say nothing. The curses you might have spat, the pleas for mercy, the sobs that jostle eagerly in your throat—one look at Lucille’s face tells you it is all for nothing. There’s no trace of human emotion there. Only the quiet, mechanical tickings of a plan slowly winding its way to fruition.

The silverware on the tray clinks as she steps forward.

“It’s time for your breakfast.”

Your stomach twists, and it’s not just with fear or nausea—you’re not sure when the last time you ate was, and your body is weak with hunger.

She sets the tray down on the bed beside you with a clatter. Beside the tea pot you see that familiar bowl of porridge, sucking in a delicately carved spoon. A spoon Lucille quickly raises to your lips, which clamp tighter in response.

“No—I won’t—” You turn your head away.

You hear Lucille sigh. It’s the only warning you get before her hand snakes out to grab your hair, wrenching your head back with a motion so brutal you can _hear_ the strands ripping. Your cry of pain is instinctive. It’s met with a spoonful of porridge.

You gag, you struggle, but in the end the greasy pulp on your tongue slides down your throat. Through the tears you could no longer hold back, you watch as Lucille scrapes up another spoonful. Her motions are precise, uncolored by the harshness of anger and stress. Her movements are poised. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

“Why?” you whisper. “Why poison me now?”

“It isn’t poisoned.” She immediately sees you don’t believe her. The spoon settles back into the porridge with a clink. The next metal implement to come near your face is the slim blade of a knife.

Your body seizes up with tension, but there’s nowhere for you to go. You can only watch as Lucille gently taps the plaster on your cheek, like a little hand knocking to come in. “If I was going to kill you, dear Edith, it wouldn’t be with poison.” The blade of the knife tilted upwards until the point rests on your bandage. You watch as she spins the blade, imagine what it would feel like if she plunged it downward right now. Something comes over Lucille’s face then; the permanent, eerie smile falters. A moment later the knife is gone, and she reaching back for the porridge again.

Lucille holds the spoon before your mouth, inspects the disbelief in your eyes. When it’s clear you still have no plans of cooperating, she shrugs and takes the spoon into her own mouth. You hear the metal scrape against her teeth, watch her throat bob with a convincing swallow.

“See?” she says. Slowly, she leans in and opens her mouth like a snake, her tongue flicking up and down so you can see there was no trick. “I wouldn’t poison myself, would I?”

You’re not so sure. But the next time she brings the spoon to your mouth, you open and take it in without a fight. You have no doubt Lucille would gladly force-feed you the rest of this meal, and the next, and the one after that. This is the easier option, you think, as the spoon slides over your tongue and deposits its taste of ash. Lucille watches you eat with a hunger of her own.

There is nothing to break the silence but the gentle rasp of metal over china, the click in your throat as you swallow.

 

 

 

When next you awake, you can scarcely move. Your arms are bound with weights, held to the bed so securely that to lift them even an inch is beyond even your contemplation. Your entire body feels large and foreign, as if you were covered in mounds of that thick red clay that dried and hardened around you.

You watch what you are capable of seeing without the benefit of movement. The room is dark, lit by a handful of candles that do little more than deepen the shadows. In the corner of the room, movement catches your eye. A wisp of something pale clinging to the ceiling—a spider web. Something struggles inside it, a fly twitching and buzzing in its desperation to break free. There is no sign of the spider. You know it must not be far away.

Your heart is the most lively thing in your body, and it leaps and pounds like fists struggling to beat their way out of your chest. You need to move, to get out of this bed, or even just to shift your eyes away from the frantic buzzing from the corner where you have no choice but to look. Turning your heart is akin to rolling a massive boulder up a muddy hill, but you have hours, days, eternity—your head tips to the side, and you inspect exactly what it is Lucille has done to you now.

Your arms lie on the covers beside you, unbound. There isn’t a mark on them, besides the fading yellow bruises where cloth once held them down. The dress you’re now wearing is not the one you put on last, its folds arranged around you with a practiced eye. You have no memory of changing your clothing.

The sound of quiet footsteps creaks towards the bed. You cannot move; you will not close your eyes. You’re nothing more than a child again, paralyzed in the dark as something creeps and rattles toward you on feet of smoke. But it’s Lucille who appears in your vision a moment later, solid and very much alive. She reaches out, turns your head—you don’t have the strength to keep it from flopping like a wilting flower. The side of your face presses into the pillows. You struggle to wet your lips, to move your tongue and speak.

“You said… it wasn’t… poisoned.”

You hear Lucille’s quiet chuckle. “It wasn’t. I merely drugged you. Surely you didn’t want to be tied up like a dog forever?”

Her hand cups the side of your face, turns your head more gently this time. Your skin itches beneath the plaster as if ants are eating away at it. Her eyes settle on yours. There’s cruel triumph there, satisfaction at seeing you so wholly in her power.

“We’re all each other has, now. In the whole world, who else is there to care for us?”

She reaches down for your hand, lifts it before your eyes—you watch as her fingers lace with yours, feeling their warmth and unable to yank away no matter how hard you try. The touch sets your skin crawling, as if the faint hairs on your arms were trying to worm their way out of your flesh.

Her hand slides from your face to tease down your neck as cool and smooth as drops of water, dripping into the hollow of your throat, sliding lower. It comes to a stop between your breasts, and in her silence and stillness you realize she’s feeling your heartbeat. Her eyes stare down through your chest as if she can watch the desperate pulsing of the muscle beneath, a cat staring at the movements of a fish below the surface of a pond. You think for a moment she intends to plunge her hands through skin and bone, to dig around in your chest until she finds something worth yanking back out again. The hand tightens over the fabric of your dress—you feel her nails scrape the skin. But it’s only a moment later that the pressure is suddenly gone, and your hand falls limply to the bed as Lucille turns away.

You feel the imprint of her touch long after the click of the door as she leaves. The bones in your hand ache where she squeezed it. Over your heart, five pinpricks of fire.

 

 

 

It’s difficult to say how long you’ve been in bed. How long since the life you’d chosen for yourself fell apart at the seams, and revealed the festering decay beneath. In the long, empty hours between Lucille’s frequent visits, there’s nothing for you to do but think: think, and struggle to move the limbs which once let you waltz so smoothly that the candle in Thomas’s hand stayed bright and alive. You cheek has nearly healed. You think that must mean weeks.

You think of him often, but not as much as a freshly-made widow should. In the end, you decide that it’s better he’s dead. You cast him away before that, severed him from you like a rotting limb. He belonged to Lucille—he was the lure, and she was the knife. Perhaps he loved you both. But all of his love was putrid on the inside.

And so, you do not think of him. Lucille is another matter.

She comes in to speak to you, to feed you, to help you to the bathroom. Lucille has swollen up to consume your entire world. She is your caretaker, your jailor, your only companion. But in a way, you are the same to her; she is just as alone as you are. Now that your hands are no longer bound you are allowed a semblance of independence; but the meals keep coming, their bitter aftertaste coating your tongue and setting you adrift. You are too weak to rise from bed without aid. You have become little more than the curl of your hair still tucked away in Lucille’s drawer, or the books with their secret, bawdy images locked in Lucille’s chest.

You hear her crying out at night, her voice rising from the other room. You’ve seen no more ghosts since Thomas died, but you hear them—their moans shivering on the air, the pops and creaks of gristle and bone shuffling from the corridors outside. You do not think that Lucille can see them. But perhaps she doesn’t have to; not all ghosts walk the halls.

One night you’re awakened in the darkness by the sound of a door slowly sliding open. You struggle to lift your head and clear the fog from your mind; you realize the intruder is human. Ghosts don’t shut the door after themselves, nor do they cross the floor with the tentative steps to avoid making the floor creak. A pale face swims out of the darkness before your eyes. Lucille. Once again, you were expecting a spirit. You don’t know what might hang in the air about her that makes her seem closer to the living than the dead. Now, looming over your bedside, her sharp-boned face seems to push through flesh and skin, draped in skull-like shadows.

She doesn’t speak. You largely lack the capacity. Instead, she sits on the bed across from you, tracing her hands over the smooth bedspread, seemingly lost in thought. Her hair hangs around her shoulders like a length of tattered black cloth. Her eyes stare out like the empty windows of this house, and for a moment you almost expect to see dark figures moving inside them. It’s then that you know this woman knows something about what it means to be haunted. The knowledge inspires understanding, but no sense of sympathy.

“I’ve been dreaming, lately,” she whispers to the darkness, to you. “I never used to.” A long silence uncurls around you both, her sitting as rigid as a decrepit house just beginning its fall, you lying loose-limbed beside her and struggling to stay awake. You don’t know what she’s about to do next. You have a bad feeling.

You hear the creak of the bed, feel it move under some shifting of weight—and then Lucille’s face is right beside your own, her body lying parallel to yours but not touching. “Are you frightened, being in here by yourself?” she whispers.

You struggle to watch her out of the corner of your eye. Your lips are thick and numb, but you know she will demand an answer. “Sometimes,” you say at last.

A shiver travels across the bed and into you. “Do you believe in evil?”

This time, you manage a short, humorless laugh. Lucille has given you no choice in that matter. You realize your mistake a moment later, and brace for the rebuke—but Lucille only lies there quietly, her breathing whispering with your own. When her hands touch you it’s to drape an arm over your middle, while the fingers of the other toy with a lock of your golden hair like a child with a doll. “Don’t touch me,” you whisper, but you can’t pull away and there’s nowhere for you to go.

Her hands continue their slow path, stroking through your hair. “Just close your eyes,” she murmurs to you, “and all the bad things will go away.” But you don’t close your eyes. You lie there, staring into the darkness until her hands come to a rest beside you. Lucille presses her forehead to your shoulder, and lies so still you know she cannot be asleep. You don’t think she sleeps at all. Neither do you.

She spends her nights with you from then on. You begin to feel used to her cold, light touches, the way her fingers brush across you as a reminder that you’re still there, still with her. Her touches are like the prickling of a spider’s legs, her eyes wet and gleaming.

You see no more ghosts these days. They are no more than a shifting at the edge of your consciousness, a wisp of smoke in the corner of your eye. But you wake up to Lucille’s fingernails digging into your arm, her body shaking so hard it seems about to collapse. “What do you see?” you whisper to her. She can only shake her head, staring at something you no longer need to see.

One morning you awake to her digging her hands into your muscles so hard you think she means to torture you—her touch roves up your arms and legs as if she’s testing the tenderness of your meat. It’s only the next day when the chair appears by your bed that you realize what she intends. Your muscles, of course, are still so stiff they are nearly useless when you haul yourself into the chair. But it’s more freedom than you’ve been allowed for weeks.

The first thing you do, of course, is try to escape. You wait until Lucille is playing the piano before moving the wheels so slowly that she doesn’t hear you slip away. You make it to the door, tugging it open from your chair in a burst of wind and snow. You hardly make it ten yards before you feel the hands pulling you back, turning your chair around to face the brooding face of Allerdale Hall, back towards the door open like a mouth. Your screams are lost in the storm, and then expand to fill the entry hall as the doors slide shut behind you.

You aren’t sure how long it is after that before she lets you back in the chair again. The drugs make it hard to tell. But the next time you try and escape, she doesn’t try to stop you—only comes out to collect you when you’ve been lost in the snow for what must be hours, no sign of the road or even the gate, inches from freezing to death. She warms your hands in her own because the fires burn too coldly. Into them she presses a cup of tea.

That is likely the moment when you truly lose hope.  

 

 

 

In your dreams, you walk the house. You pass by the ghosts which you only see in your dreams, saying nothing—you can’t be sure that you’re not one of them now, hanging between life and death, unable to leave. You drift down the elevator shaft to the room down below, and find it empty—no Alan, no Thomas, no bodies. You brush past the moths that cling to the walls, tremulous, feather-light, only slightly more real than you are. And then, when you wake, Lucille is waiting for you. You can never escape for long. It’s necessary to entertain a certain degree of acceptance.

You wheel yourself to the bathroom, leaving Lucille in the bed. This time, you do not wait for the taps to run clear. Your bath is red, leaving its traces on your skin until you look little less like a ghost yourself. It mingles with your hair, pale gold and blood red. The house marks you, sinks into your skin until it’s simply another part of you. The water smells of cold earth and clay. You sink into it and pretend that it’s your grave, that Lucille stuck the cleaver into your brain that day in the snow so long ago, and let you slip into the peace of a warm red vat.

It’s a long time before you notice Lucille standing in the doorway. She watches you, expression unreadable as her eyes travel the curves of your body half-hidden in red. You wonder if she’s remembering her mother, how the bathwater ran red that night just as it does now. But when Lucille steps closer there’s no glint of metal in her hands—its her eyes that shine like cold iron.

“You truly are a beauty, Edith,” she whispers. “I can understand why he chose you.”

It’s the first time she’s spoken of Thomas since he died—since she killed him. You’re not sure what you can say that is safe, but you have to speak. “It wasn’t just him that chose,” you say. “You chose me as well.”

Lucille chuckles coldly. “Ah. Yes. You were a quite promising lamb for the slaughter.”

“And what am I now?”

Lucille falls silent. You want an answer—need it more than anything. Why is she keeping you alive? Are you a talisman against the ever-watching eyes of the house? The last thing Lucille has to remind her of her own humanity? Or perhaps you’re just a fly, caught in a spider’s web until it decides to bleed you dry.

You receive no answer. Lucille watches you with an expression you cannot place—as if you are the ghost, dripping red and twisted beyond recognition, and she is the frightened woman with no other choice but to see you. You open your mouth to speak, and find her finger pressed to your lips. Obedient as ever, you fall silent. Your mouth stays shut, even when her fingers wander over to trace your lips, to stroke your eyelashes, to gently press over your hair. She touches you like someone who has never met another person before, and needs to be sure they aren’t some figment from a dream.

“He promised me he wouldn’t fall in love,” she whispers. “Perhaps I was a fool to look at you, and believe him.”

“He didn’t love me,” you say. “He didn’t know what love was.”

Lucille’s fingers twitch beside your eye. Her thumbnail rests just below your lower lid, pressing the tender skin there. Something flickers across Lucille’s face, a pale and sunless rage. For a moment, your heart stands still in your chest.

But Lucille only tilts her head. “And I suppose you do?”

“Of course!” You hate how childish your voice sounds. How can this creature sit beside you now, and tell you

“You think you loved him. Would you have killed for him?” 

Your mouth opens: the denial falls flat and silent against the inside of your cheek.

Lucille nods in approval. “I thought not.”

“But you’re wrong,” you argue in spite of yourself. “Something so ugly as murder could never be born from love.”

“Love kills us every day,” she replies. “What better way to honor it in turn?”

When her fingers run over the scar on your cheek, her lips quirk in a strange smile. “Are you pleased to have marred my beauty?” you say, wondering whether she can hear the racing of your heart, hear its echoes in the tremble of your voice.

Lucille’s head dips towards you, her mouth peeling open. You feel its soft wetness tracing the scar, pressing each word to your skin. “My mark on you is your crowning attribute.”

Her hand slides beneath the red water, and you do nothing to stop it.

 

 

 

At first, you tell yourself you are waiting for spring. But it seems you move deeper into winter without the promise of warmth on the other side; as if the cold only shuffles closer to the walls of the house, breathing down its chimneys and stirring flurries through the air of the great hall. The walls seem to warp and stretch around you both as if trying to writhe away from the cold, its pipes moaning in agony. You are consumed with fever. It licks over your limbs when Lucille is with you, and as she sinks her teeth into your shoulder and your back arches off the bed, you ask yourself: _Why are you doing this?_ And have no answer.

You thought that the house was a labyrinth, and the woman beside you the minotaur. You think now perhaps you are full of halls and chambers and darkness, and Lucille wanders within you with claws scrabbling among the dust. Sweat beads on your back like melted snowflakes. You hate her. You want to tear her apart. But your hands form claws that only skim her flesh, that rake and scrape her form into shapes you hadn’t imagined. On the inside, you are both like warm clay.

You can’t remember the last time you were alone. You move from room to room together, never touching but never far. Neither of you seem to understand why, only that when you’re apart the empty room seems to tense, like the haunches of an animal about to spring forward and devour you. You are convinced that the house is watching your every move. When you are with Lucille you know nothing can come of it—all you must fear is each other. It’s an odd sort of relief.

Lucille plays the piano, her fingers two pale spiders jerking across the keys. The music she produces is jagged-edged and haunting; at night sometimes you think you hear it drifting up to you through the floor, but you feel those hands clinging to you too tightly to be asleep. You know she hears it too. As the shadows grow longer you see her eyes begin to drift, following things that aren’t there. She moves closer to you then, saying nothing. She drinks the tea too now, her shaking hands raising the cup again and again until her eyes begin to glaze. You lay down together and simply drift, forgetting the cold, forgetting each other.

It would not be so difficult to kill her. You’re beginning to think she would welcome it—that this is why she has kept you all these months, despising you with every moment yet doing everything in her power to keep you here with her. You know she hates you, almost as much as you hate her. But you are coming to understand that love and hatred have never been easy for Lucille Sharpe to distinguish. That thought is not what stays your hand. If you killed her, you would be alone. Or worse, perhaps not as alone as you might think.

One morning you awake to find no one in bed beside you.  

The room vibrates with silence. No ghostly moans or figures trembling on the air—there is nothing, and that is worse. You climb out of bed on your own two feet as you try to remember how to trust your legs, and you start looking. Going from room to room is like picking up a shell and peering inside, waiting to find something shriveled and horrible inside.

You find her in the attic. She’s staring into oblivion as you enter the room, slack-faced and empty inside. She hears the press of your fawn-clumsy footsteps and raises her head to look—in that moment you want to offer some excuse as to why you came looking for her, something more than _You weren’t there._

“Do you hate me, Edith?”

You think about the question. “Yes,” you decide. It’s a solution more than it is an answer, the sum of actions leading to an inevitable conclusion. She gave you no choice but to hate her. What you can’t tell her is that you’re alone in the world with only a monster for company, and if that hatred stood alone you would collapse like a burning house.

Lucille smiles, as if your brief admission is in some way a part of her victory. The smile, however, is a bitter one. “I can’t leave,” she says, turning out to face the white nothing out the window once more. “The house won’t let me.”

Slowly, you shuffle closer. “It can’t stop you. The choice is yours alone. You—we—could go anywhere.”

Lucille laughs hollowly. “I remember those words. But I made my choice a long time ago. You of all people know how ghosts have a habit of lingering.” Without looking, she gestures you forward. There’s none of the practiced malice in the movement, and so you follow it to her side. “If you could leave this place, where would you go?”

“Home,” you say without thinking. But what home is left to you now? Outside of these rotting walls, everything you have ever loved is dead and scattered to the winds. Crimson Peak is not your home—it is merely the tangible absence of one. It doesn’t hold you here—but still you cannot leave. Your eyes travel to Lucille’s face, the sharp jaw, the sunken eyes. She is the last thing you know, the only thing you care about—even if that care is largely defined by hatred. While she is here, there is no leaving.  

You stare off in the same direction, wondering what visions Lucille expects you to share in. With a start, you realize she isn’t watching specters at all: her eyes look out the window, studying the tiny movements there.

At first, you think it’s rain. Water droplets slide down the icicles clinging to the roof and fall to the ground like tears. Beyond them, the sun shines remote and pale as the snow—but the snow is not as deep as it was. The winter is coming to an end.

You understand what Lucille needs from you.

 

 

 

She drinks the pot of tea, one cup after another. She does not offer you any. You watch as her head grows heavier, her hands sloshing tea down the side of her cup to fleck her dress and saucer. She doesn’t stop until the entire pot is empty, and only then does she raise her empty eyes to yours. There’s a light deep inside them now, like mouth of a cave from the inside. “I’m feeling tired,” she says. “I think I’ll lie down.”

But it isn’t to the bedrooms that Lucille guides you. She clings to your arm, her footsteps shuffling on the stones, as you both clamber into the elevator and shut the grate behind you with a metal screech. The smell of earth fills your nose, as if your flesh and blood is really red clay packed beneath your skin. Lucille’s weight threatens to drag you to the ground. You guide her past the vats. You imagine the bodies curled up inside, suspended in thick red wombs. You know without asking who each belongs to: Enola here. Thomas there. Alan, just an arm’s breadth away. And this one, far at the end, belongs to Lucille.

The clay is red with streaks of white, like fat marbled in with the flesh. A living thing, wracked with hunger. You help Lucille settle on the edge of it, her face pale, eyes half-lidded. A hand rises to fumble at your cheek, brushing it like the touch of a butterfly’s wing. Her face breaks apart with a tired smile, the truest expression you can remember seeing on it. She doesn’t ask for forgiveness any more than you’re willing to grant it to her. You never lied about hating her. Merely omitted the rest of the details.

“You said you would never kill for love,” she says, her voice laboring in a hollow chest. “It seems we both broke our promises.”

“And what promise did you break?” You tell yourself you aren’t ashamed by the way your voice trembles.

Lucille’s face twists into an expression that could have been a smile, weathered and time-worn and about to crumble. “The same one that my brother did.”

For a moment, you bow your head. And then you push her backwards into the vat.

Her hands slide from your face as she falls, hitting the liquid clay and immediately stained by it. Immediately it begins the task of sucking her down, creeping over the blue of her dress and inching up toward her face. Her eyes remain on you, half-open as if she were falling asleep. There’s no gratitude there, no suggestion of relief. Only that small, satisfied smile hanging beneath the horrible gentleness of her eyes. And then the clay inches those eyes shut, covers her mouth and nose and hair, and then Lucille Sharpe is no more.

You aren’t even aware you started crying until your breath comes out ragged and painful. You wonder if tears are weakness when the monster dies. Perhaps it’s only the emotion that rushes forward to fill the void that hate had made its own.

Chunks of frozen clay hang like ragged flesh from the buckets of Thomas’s machine. You clamber up them as you did so long ago, but this time no one is following you. You won’t take the elevator—you won’t return to the house again. When you stumble out into the snow above, you’re met with a sky so blue and snow so red that the world is unrecognizable. The air stings on your cheeks, but the sun breathes warmth on your skin and slicks the snow with sweat. Your footsteps waver. You head towards town. You can’t stay any longer.

You don’t know if you’ll make it. But you can’t be here alone.

 


End file.
